European Investments in Advanced Computing Systems Deliver Results

A paradigm shift is needed to tackle today's challenges in computing systems

January 31, 2013 - At the HiPEAC 2013 conference in Berlin, KALRAY demonstrated MPPA256, the world’s first supercomputer-on-a-chip, consisting of 256 computing cores. This innovative processor combines the ultimate in several processor types and will enable a whole new class of embedded and industrial applications in the fields of image processing, signal processing, control, communications and data security. The MPPA256 is completely designed in Europe and is only one of the success stories resulting from the 170 million Euro investment in carefully selected European funded research projects over the past 6 years.

“The MPPA256 combines the benefits of high processing power (500 billion operations per second), low power consumption and high-level programming, and it is the first highly scalable multi-core processor that can also execute real-time applications and is therefore perfectly suited for mixed criticalities systems” stated Benoit Dupont de Dinechin Director of Software Development at KALRAY and one of the main architects of the chip.

KALRAY announced its new product at HiPEAC 2013, a conference that brought together more than 500 delegates from all over the world for three days packed with more than 40 events. "The HiPEAC conference is currently the premier computing systems event in Europe” said Professor Ben Juurlink from the Technical University of Berlin, general chairman of the conference. HiPEAC, the European Network of Excellence on High Performance and Embedded Architecture and Compilation, is geared towards advancing the level of research in this field and stimulating the collaboration between academia and industry, and between computer architects and tool builders. The next HiPEAC conference will take place in Vienna, January 20 to 22, 2014.

In his opening address at HiPEAC 2013, Dr. Max Lemke, Deputy Head of Unit for Complex Systems and Advanced Computing in the Directorate General CONNECT of the European Commission, underlined the urgent need to improve the power efficiency of computing devices. “Without a serious breakthrough in this area, we will see a slowdown in the scaling of supercomputers, data centres, and the Internet of things. Europe will substantially invest in research that tackles this challenge in the next framework program Horizon 2020” he said.

This was seconded by Dr. Doug Burger, Director of Client and Cloud Applications at Microsoft Research. In his keynote, Burger additionally stated “there is more uncertainty in the field of computing now than at any time in the past 40 years; computing needs a revolution that will leave no part of it untouched”. As Moore’s law is coming to an end, we need to look forward and develop radically new solutions. “The field of computer architecture is poised to become irrelevant if it will not be able to come up with a real paradigm shift soon. We should stop investing in improvements of the solutions of the past” he said.

About HiPEAC

The HiPEAC network was founded in 2004 and embraces more than 1200 European researchers in advanced computing systems. The goal of the HiPEAC network is to strengthen the European computing systems research community through roadmapping, training, mobility, technology transfer, and networking. “The conference creates a unique opportunity for the complete computing systems community to network, and for the many companies innovating in computing systems to recruit the brightest graduates for their research and development departments” explained Dr. Panagiotis Tsarchopoulos, European project officer of the HiPEAC network.